Cagney
who can say when the day sleeps, if the night keeps all your heart?
only time
The girl is all sharp edges, right off the bat. Perhaps it might repulse someone else, but Cagney is used to sharp edges, sharp voices, sharp minds.
(She had been almost exclusively sharp edges, from meeting to the end. And their daughter was the same, a creature of ice and pinpricks and suppressed fire.)
So he takes it in stride, his body staying relaxed and his voice unerringly warm; somehow he has separated his children from Elite, or he would never be able to stand on four feet and try and move on with his life. His grief was deep enough to drown a better man, so he thinks of them without her. “Vader is my firstborn. My other child’s name is Kellyn. Thayne is Vader’s son.” He has no idea that Thayne is Elite’s son as well as he grandson, and the unfortunate creature who is Vader - broken somehow, and simple-minded - will never tell anybody. He doesn’t have the words, or even the understanding of why it would be an issue.
He is not totally sure why his sire wishes to reform the Brotherhood rather than just take over Ischia; it seems to Cagney that it would be better for Brennen to have the might of all of his children behind him, rather than just his sons; but the Brotherhood protected Cagney, supported Cagney for most of his life, and he will not stand in the way of them if they wish to resettle here. He can only imagine how it must be for Brennen, who had loved the Tundra and it’s men for five decades or nearly that before Cagney was even an imagining of a fickle god. “I was a Brother, yes. When there was a Brotherhood,” He says nothing about the future, about plans, because Brennen has not even told all of his children. Not for want of love of them, for he could hardly love them more, but because he has seen too many plans ruined by the wrong slip of the tongue, and this plan is too new, too uncertain, for that risk. “Since my return, I’ve served Ischia. It’s nice enough here, I suppose, and my family is here. I wouldn’t care to be anywhere else.”
(Without her, his family is all he has.)
“What about you, little sister? You are nearly old enough to leave the nest. Will you stay here, or pursue dreams elsewhere?”
Who can say where the road goes? Where the day flows? Only time.
